A Global Data Center (GDC) acts as a communications hub to facilitate thousands of air-to-ground and ground-to-air messages daily utilizing a variety of VHF and satellite datalink communications networks. Accessed directly from the aircraft's Flight Management System (FMS), convenient datalink messaging enables flight crews to keep in touch with the ground during all phases of flight. One issue that arises in the above system is that the message types used by aircrafts are prone to frequent changes. Hence, every time a new requirement for handling a new kind of message type comes in, the GDC has to figure out how to process the message. Moreover, different aircraft have different modules that use different message types (or different formats). For example, a first aircraft may send a position report to the GDC that contained the aircraft's latitude and longitude in a first format. A second aircraft of a different type would send its position data using a different format. Efforts to resolve this issue involved using multiple processing modules, each adapted to handle a specific message types with their specific logic arrangement. However, due to the frequent changes and additions to message types, occurrence regression is high and the process becomes inefficient.
For the reasons stated above and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for a method for effectively and efficiently handling different types of messages in a GDC system.